ne of the nicest parts of my job is that almost every day I get to talk to different people about their PC?s. Something that has been surprising me and has come up a lot lately is how little many people still know about DSL as it is offered in Bermuda. I think that Telco and the Internet Service Providers (ISP?s) still have some way to go in spreading the word about this development in Internet access.

The reason this column isn?t called is that there are already enough other places you can go if you want highly involved explanations, so lets see if I can give you an idea of the process for obtaining DSL without getting too technical and boring.

DSL stands for Digital Subscriber Line and it is the most readily available way to get much faster Internet access without changing the telephone wiring in your house. Everybody I?ve talked to who has DSL finds it is a very worthwhile. Once you have it you won?t want to give it up. There are two new accounts you have to set up, one with your ISP (Logic, Northrock, etc), the cost of this account depends on the speed of the connection you want or can afford, and the second is with Telco. Whether you can even get the Telco DSL service depends on its availability in your area. You should be able to check on this by going online to http://www.btc.bm/D1/PR01-04 asp and type in your telephone number. If it is available where you live it will take at least ten working days for Telco to connect you. This process takes place somewhere else; nobody comes to your house.

Before I changed to DSL we were paying an ISP for a $99 per month unlimited access Dial-Up (slooowww) account. I don?t remember what the basic telephone rate for the number was but I do know that sometimes our overcalls ran into the hundreds and cost twenty cents per call.

This added up. Every time we logged on to the Internet cost another twenty cents. One day it dawned on me that if we got a 128k DSL account our telephone charges would be fixed at $99 per month and in addition to that there would be no more overcalls and, another thing, we could be online and still receive and make voice calls or receive faxes on the same line simultaneously. No more busy signals when you?ve got a growing business is a good thing. When we started with DSL we were actually paying ten dollars less per month to our ISP too. So for us DSL is a win-win deal even before we get to the much faster connection aspect.

Also going on-line is faster too. It takes consistently three seconds to connect. 1-2-3. Just like that and you can leave it on 24 hours per day if you want to.

Of course after a while we wanted an even faster connection and so we moved to a theoretical 512kbps connection. More on that later.

A couple of pieces of equipment are necessary to get connected to DSL which uses existing telephone lines. You?ll need an easy to install in-line phone filter for each phone in your house. These are about $9.50 each. You?ll also need a DSL modem, the one you have now for your dial-up connection will no longer be used but you can leave it in place. In Hamilton you can buy a DSL modem/router for $150, which makes it possible to feed the Internet to two PC?s at the same time. The last piece of equipment you might need, if there isn?t one already installed on your computer and all the new PC?s seem to come with them already, is a network card also known as a NIC.

When Telco tell you that your line has been switched over to DSL you can then make arrangements with your ISP to give you a new DSL Internet account and cancel your existing Dial-Up account. Let?s be clear, you need to make arrangements with Telco an ISP. We moved our existing long-standing e-mail addresses to the new DSL account, but of course we stayed with the same ISP.

Setting up was very straightforward. We plugged the DSL modem into the telephone line and were pleased to see the glowing light on the modem which indicated that the DSL signal was present. Next plug the DSL modem, which is an external box with some lights and an on-off switch, into the network card using the supplied cable. Making the new connection (at least in Windows XP) was no more difficult to set-up than it had been for the original old Dial-Up connection. We?re paying our Internet Service Provider for a 512kbps Upload but I wondered what we were actually getting. I logged on to ran through the connection speed test there and was somewhat disappointed to see I was only connecting at 259kbps (kilobytes per second) which is pretty good except where you?re paying for 512kbps. Why don?t you log on, even if you have a Dial-Up connection, and see what you?re really getting?

North Rock has a wireless Internet service called Connect, which a couple of my customers use with more on the way. I have to think that eliminating the telephone company from the process is bound to reduce cost and the possibility of being bounced between two service providers when there?s a problem.